ACHIEVING A PAPERLESS OFFICE
The basic idea of the paperless office has been around since the late 70’s with a vision that all
business documents are stored electronically rather than in hard copy. The potential benefits
from achieving a paperless office include productivity gains, costs savings, space saving,
sharing information easily and reduced environmental impact. The ability to scan and store an
image of a document electronically was the catalyst for this idea but over the same time period
printer and photocopier technology and software such as word processing have improved
dramatically, making it much easier to produce documents in bulk. As a result, producing and
printing documents has been significantly deskilled and the use of paper has actually
proliferated. Technology has therefore both helped and hindered the achievement of a
paperless office. Nonetheless, a wide arrays of organisations are striving to go paperless.
Indeed the flight deck of the new Airbus A380 was conceived as the “paperless cockpit”.
To really allow an office to become paperless requires more than simply scanning documents.
Paper must become redundant for routine tasks such as record-keeping, bookkeeping and the
sending and receiving of business transaction documents such as orders, invoices, remittances
etc. The retrieval of documents must also be straightforward and to date designing good
indexing and cross referencing systems for the stored documents has been a challenge.
However, there are a number of technologies that now make a paperless office much more
achievable:

E-mail has had the biggest impact, allowing communications to become electronic with
the ability to attach documents as required. This is very suitable for letters and
proposals etc but not as suitable for sharing many other business documents such as
sales or supplier contracts that require controlled access on an ad-hoc basis.

Accounting systems are often the main generator of business documents such as
quotes, orders, invoices, remittances etc. Many accounting systems now allow these
to be generated and issued electronically via email. Ideally this should be at the touch
of a button from within the accounting system rather than by generating a PDF which
later has to be emailed as an attachment.
Visor Limited, Sand House, Bath Place, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland
T: +353 (1) 7074400 Email: sales@accountsIQ.com Web: www.accountsIQ.com
Company Registration No. : 366570
Directors: Tony Connolly, Eddie Murphy, Gerard McKeown, Brian D. Murphy, William Parker, Thomas P. Shinkwin

In addition, accounting documents generated outside the system can now be scanned
and stored against the relevant transaction, account or product. This includes
purchase invoices, proof of delivery, sales contracts, supplier contracts, pricelists etc.
In this case the key is to be able to use the accounting system as the mechanism for
retrieval rather than having to separately come up with an indexing system – thus the
accounting system itself becomes the indexing and retrieval system.

Internet banking allows payments to be made on line and statements to be received
electronically. Good accounting systems link directly to Internet Banking so that the
workflow of determining what has to be paid, paying it electronically and reconciliation
and synchronisation with banking records is seamless. This represents potential for
significant cost savings as processing cheque payments can cost £s including postage
and other costs but electronic payments cost pence.

In terms of information sharing, the ability to store on the Internet in encrypted format
means that documents are always available where you need them from anywhere.
Traditionally this is achieved from constant photo copying of hard copy documents or
sending whole files to, for example, accountants/auditors. Access to emails and
accounting systems and related documents via the web makes sharing documents
much easier without requiring hard copies.
The paperless office is now considered to be a philosophy to work with minimal paper and
convert all forms of documentation to a digital form. Whilst a fully paperless office may be
difficult to achieve, the technologies outlined above are now readily and cost effectively
accessible to all businesses and therefore a “less paper” office is easily achieved. Although the
paperless office is not yet a widespread reality, a myth it is not and businesses need to embrace
the benefits it can bring.
Visor Limited, Sand House, Bath Place, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland
T: +353 (1) 7074400 Email: sales@accountsIQ.com Web: www.accountsIQ.com
Company Registration No. : 366570
Directors: Tony Connolly, Eddie Murphy, Gerard McKeown, Brian D. Murphy, William Parker, Thomas P. Shinkwin